Arts and Entertainment
Chaos takes shape at
the Ballen Centre
Roger Ballen’s latest exhibition, “Chaos Has Many Faces”, presents his first major colour work alongside the launch of a landmark new book, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK.
Johannesburg holds a new artistic magnet: a place where rooms feel alive and objects appear midway through a dream. The Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in Forest Town is hosting Chaos Has Many Faces, an exhibition that draws visitors into Roger Ballen’s psychological theatre.
The show opened on 21 October 2025 and runs until 31 January 2026, which gives the city an extended encounter with one of the most distinctive visual worlds produced on South African soil.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of Spirits and Spaces, Ballen’s first major body of colour work. The book, published internationally by Thames & Hudson and locally by Jonathan Ball Publishers, marks a turning point in his five-decade career. For years he worked in black and white, yet colour now brings a new register to his sets, drawings and sculptural arrangements.
“For much of my career I resisted working in colour,” says Ballen. “I felt it distracted from the psychological depth of black and white. But when I began experimenting with the Leica SL camera, I realised colour could be used not as decoration, but as a way to intensify atmosphere and emotion. It brought a new dimension to my world, one that felt inevitable.”
The exhibition, curated by longtime collaborator Marguerite Rossouw, forms an environment rather than a sequence of framed prints. Visitors step through wallpapered rooms filled with figures, animals and objects that appear caught inside a moment of suspended action. The palette of greys, browns and creams, punctuated by flashes of chromatic intensity, sharpens the strange tension that defines his visual language.
The sets are described as carefully constructed spaces shaped for psychological effect, and the installation follows this approach with precision.
The opening coincided with the International Association of Genocide Scholars conference at the neighbouring Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre. Two companion installations expand the exhibition into a broader cultural conversation: Beyond Genocide, created by Amy Fagin and Linda Paganelli, and South–South Conversations, curated by Marcelo Brodsky. Both pieces explore historical and collective memory through powerful visual language.
This combined launch stands as one of the most significant phases in Ballen’s recent work. His photographs appear in global collections from MoMA to the Pompidou, and his long residence in South Africa gives this project a particular gravity. The partnership with Rossouw shapes an installation that brings together decades of visual experimentation while opening a fresh chapter.
With free admission and a run through 31 January 2026, the exhibition invites audiences to return more than once. Each visit reveals new relationships between objects, drawings and figures inside the rooms. It also strengthens the role of the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography within the Inside Out Foundation, which supports photographic and ecological education across Africa.
This moment places Johannesburg at the centre of a major artistic milestone for an artist whose influence spans continents and generations.
- Roger Ballen will deliver a lecture on the theme of his new book, Spirits and Spaces, on 22 November 2025 at 10am at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, 2 Duncombe Rd, Forest Town, Johannesburg. Book for the lecture, titled From Black and White to Colour: Fifty Years of Roger Ballen’s Vision, at the Inside Out Foundation website, here.
* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.
